One of my intentions, when I began this blog, was to draw on the available literature to piece together a neural geography of object handling. That personal project has taken a variety of turns since then, to the point that I have now enrolled on a MSc programme in Psychology (part-time). (This is one of the reasons why blog entries have been so thin on the ground lately.)

Anyway, as I was grazing on library books one day, I came across ‘The Organisation of Mind‘ by Shallice and Cooper. In this I found that various researchers are ahead of me in this intention. (This is not surprising and, in truth, is the assumption on which this entire project has been based – that most of the answers are out there, they just need to be found and collated in a particular way.)

Anyway, in Chapter 3 (p81) Shallice and Cooper reproduce the diagram below from Marconi et al. showing the anatomical relationships between systems in the parietal and frontal cortices involved in hand-eye coordination involved in reaching for an object.

Note: this is just the systems involved in reaching out for an object. This is not ‘reaching out for an object, feeling the object, experiencing the evocation of memory & imagination and sharing that experience with others’: just reaching out.

When I started this project, I don’t think that I could have imagined this degree of complexity and, staring at it, I am quite daunted by what I’ve gotten myself into. Nonetheless, the topic still fascinates me, so I’ll persevere in skipping in the footsteps of serious researchers.